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In 1887-1907 Alabama Democrat John Tyler Morgan played a leading role on the Committee. Morgan called for a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through Nicaragua, enlarging the merchant marine and the Navy, and acquiring Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba. He expected Latin American and Asian markets would become a new export market for Alabama's cotton, coal, iron, and timber. The canal would make trade with the Pacific much more feasible, and an enlarged military would protect that new trade. By 1905, most of his dreams had become reality, with of course the canal going to Panama instead of Nicaragua.[2]

During World War II, the committee took the lead in rejecting traditional isolationism and designing a new internationalist foreign policy based on the assumption that the United Nations would be a much more effective force than the old discredited League of Nations. Of special concern was the insistence that Congress play a central role in postwar foreign policy, as opposed to its ignorance of the main decisions made during the war.[3] Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg played the central role.In 1943, a confidential analysis of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was made by British scholar Isaiah Berlin for his Foreign Office.[4][5]

In 1966, as tensions over the Vietnam War escalated, the Committee set up hearings on possible relations with Communist China. Witnesses, especially academic specialists on East Asia, suggested to the American public that it was time to adopt a new policy of containment without isolation. The hearings Indicated that American public opinion toward China had moved away from hostility and toward cooperation. The hearings had a long-term impact when Richard Nixon became president, discarded containment, and began a policy of détente with China.[6] The problem remained of how to deal simultaneously with the Chinese government on Taiwan after formal recognition was accorded to the Beijing government. The Committee drafted the Taiwan Relations Act (US, 1979) which enabled the United States both to maintain friendly relations with Taiwan and to develop fresh relations with China.[7]

Republican Senator Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative, was Committee chairman in the late 1990s. He pushed for reform of the UN by blocking payment of U.S. membership dues.[8]

Maguire, Lori. "The US Congress and the politics of Afghanistan: an analysis of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees during George W Bush's second term." Cambridge Review of International Affairs (2013) 26#2 pp: 430-452.